How does poker stack up against other popular card and board games when it comes to complexity? A gaming website recently studied this issue to rank the games with the most rules, and it turns out that poker fared pretty well against some of the world’s most popular games.
Texas hold’em checked in at No. 138 among games with Omaha at No. 139, and right above games like Clue and Minecraft: Heroes of the Village. According to the study from solitaired.com, both games have around 2,200 words when it comes to the number of rules to play (although no reference was given as to where those rules came from).
“Classic, non-commercial games like variations of poker tend to have far shorter rulebooks,” the study notes.
Another popular gambling game, blackjack, came out at 174th on the list with 1,271 words needed to explain the rules. By comparison, Magic: The Gathering topped the list with more than 100,000 words in the rule book. There are also more than 19,000 unique cards, compared to the traditional 52 in standard deck for poker.
The game is so intricate that an MIT study found that a computer using the Turing model was unable to determine who was the winner of any particular hand.
The game has been popular for decades, and many top poker players came had notable Magic backgrounds, including ‘Nacho’ Barbero, David Williams, Eric Froehlich, Brock Parker, Jon Finkel, Isaac Haxton, Scott Seiver, Anthony Gregg, Gabriel Nassif, as well as the two players atop the all-time money list in Justin Bonomo and Bryn Kenney.
Chess, another game popular with many poker players, finished 209th on the list with 678 words. Some of the poker players who have excelled at the game through the years include Jen Shahade, Dan Harrington, Ylon Schwartz, Dan Smith, Nick Eastwood, Almira Skripchenko, and James Obst. Former world champion Magnus Carlsen has also been spotted at several poker events throughout the last few years, and even has a sponsorship with an online poker site.
Of 242 games ranked, Old Maid was rated the easiest with only 274 words listed in the rulebook. The site used lists of favorite games and then utilized various computer-based programs regarding word counts of rules as well as reading complexity to rank each game.
For the complete study, click here.